E3: Sony steals the show with great looking and playing software, plenty of demo units, and a no-nonsense approach to the PS3

Sony shows off what the PS3 can do, and erases all doubts of their readiness …

I went into Sony’s booth expecting a song and dance and a lot of BS. Isn’t that all we’ve gotten from Sony in the past year or so? It doesn’t help that when I ask every developer what it was like working with Sony on their PS3 titles I get a terse “no comment.” Sony has made themselves an easy target with their price point, and a lot of people still remember last year’s E3 with those gameplay videos that many claimed were prerendered or otherwise prettied up. Sony had a lot to work against this year, so they took an interesting approach to their booth.

They shut up and let us play the games. And they were great. This is me officially eating a heapin’ helping of crow.

I spent a good twenty minutes playing Warhawk and the game looks incredible. While it’s not a great leap up from what we’ve seen from the 360 it’s incredibly solid and moves great. It’s been a long wait for a new Warhawk game, and this looks to be worth it. The enemies were plentiful, blew up real nice, and the larger capital ships had multiple targets you could hit to take them down. The surprise was how good the motion sensing technology worked in the game. You tilted the controller to roll, dive, and climb, and it felt like I was really flying. This isn’t a cheap gimmick to keep up with Nintendo, it was built into the game as the primary way of controlling your craft and it was amazingly accurate. This technology is going to be great for the PS3, from now on we’re going to have to take the controller seriously instead of the earlier claim that it was a desperate move. Warhawk is going to be the killer-app for this system, it’s that good.

I also got the chance to race the Shelby Cobra on the Nurburgring in Gran Turismo HD, the high definition edition of Gran Turismo 4. It’s beautiful, and it was running at 1080p at a perfect framerate. Impressive. We do have to remember that this is an upgrade of a game that’s been on the market for a while, so it’ll be until we see other games running in 1080p before we make any predictions about the hardware’s capabilities at that resolution.

The PS3 Genji looked and played nice, but it had a noticeably laggy framerate. God of War 2 is as good as we expected it to be, with even better looking monsters. If anything this game exists on an even larger scale than the first one, and that’s saying something. Okami looks amazing, it can’t be released soon enough. Dirge of Cerberus is Devil May Cry with Final Fantasy Trappings. They also let us play a Gundam title for the PS3, which tended to be sparse in detail (the levels took place in the desert) but was very pretty nonetheless.

We got a chance to play with the PS3 UI and anyone who has spent any amount of time with a PSP will recognize it immediately, it’s basically the same UI. It’s functional, simple, and easy to use. We got a chance to look at some video of movie trailers to show the kinds of things you’ll be able to download to the hard drive and it looked amazing, if this is how good we can expect Blu-Ray movies to look through the PS3 that price point may become much easier to take.

One of the more novel concept we got to play with was the Eye of Judgement game and hardware. The game is played on a 3X3 square mat under a sort of metallic looking camera. The camera shows the mat, and as you put real world cards onto the playing surface monsters are “summoned” from the cards on your television. You can even interact with them in a sort of Eye Toy way. The game looked impressive and surprisingly deep, and since you can buy booster packs with new monsters and levels like you can Magic cards it seems like it’d be a license to print money. It’s the sort of innovative product we were hoping to see at this show, and I was impressed by it. The fighting animations are pretty long though, and that could drag the game though.

Sony had a great booth. While they had the huge screens showing rolling demos and thumping music it didn’t seem like they had a lot to prove. The games were real, they looked and played great, and they were all there right on the floor. Sony proved it to me, and I walked away really excited for the PS3, and not as put off by the price point.